The Antichrist

by

Friedrich Nietzsche

Published 1895

translation by H.L. Mencken

Published 1920

PREFACE

This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet
alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my
"Zarathustra": how could I confound myself with those who are now
sprouting ears?--First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are
born posthumously.

The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily
understands me--I know them only too well. Even to endure my
seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge
of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops--and to
looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath
him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth
whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him... He must have an
inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage
for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth.
The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what
is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained
unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner--to hold
together his strength, his enthusiasm...Reverence for self; love of self;
absolute freedom of self.....

Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my
readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?--The rest are
merely humanity.--One must make one's self superior to humanity, in power,
in loftiness of soul,--in contempt.

FRIEDRICH W. NIETZSCHE.

1.

--Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans--we know well
enough how remote our place is. "Neither by land nor by water will you find
the road to the Hyperboreans": even Pindar1,in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North,
beyond the ice, beyond death--our life, our happiness...We
have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it
from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?--The
man of today?--"I don't know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever
doesn't know either the way out or the way in"--so sighs the man of
today...This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,--we sickened
on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the
modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that
"forgives" everything because it "understands" everything is a sirocco to
us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such
south-winds! . . . We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor
others; but we were a long time finding out where to direct our
courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate--it was
the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for
the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the
happiness of the weakling, from "resignation" . . . There was thunder in our
air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast--for we had not yet found
the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a
goal...

2.

What is good?--Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power,
power itself, in man. What is evil?--Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?--The feeling that power increases--thatresistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace
at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the
Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid). The weak
and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one
should help them to it. What is more harmful than any vice?--Practical
sympathy for the botched and the weak--Christianity...

3.

The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the
order of living creatures (--man is an end--): but what type of man must be
bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most
worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.

This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always
as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed.
Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been
almost the terror of terrors ;--and out of that terror the contrary
type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal,
the herd animal, the sick brute-man--the Christian. . .

4.

Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or
stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This "progress" is
merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today,
in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the
process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation,
enhancement, strengthening.

True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various
parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in
these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something
which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such
happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain
possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and
nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.

5.

We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to
the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest
instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil,
of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts--the strong man as the
typical reprobate, the "outcast among men." Christianity has taken the part
of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of
antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it
has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually
most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as
misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the
corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by
original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!--

6.

It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn
back the curtain from the rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth,
is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation
against humanity. It is used--and I wish to emphasize the fact
again--without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the
rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters
where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward "virtue" and
"godliness." As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the sense
of decadence: my argument is that all the values on which mankind now
fixes its highest aspirations are decadence-values.

I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its
instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it.
A history of the "higher feelings," the "ideals of humanity"--and it is
possible that I'll have to write it--would almost explain why man is so
degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for
survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the
will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest
values of humanity have been emptied of this will--that the values of
decadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.

7.

Christianity is called the religion of pity.-- Pity stands in
opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling
of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through
pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a
thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain
circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy--a
loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (--the case of the
death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there is, however, a
still more important one. If one measures the effects of pity by the gravity
of the reactions it sets up, its character as a menace to life appears in a
much clearer light. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the
law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it
fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by
maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life
itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a
virtue (--in every superior moral system it appears as a weakness--);
going still further, it has been called the virtue, the source and
foundation of all other virtues--but let us always bear in mind that this
was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose
shield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in
this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made worthy of
denial--pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing
and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work for
the preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of protector of
the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of decadence--pity
persuades to extinction....Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one
says "the other world," or "God," or "the true life," or Nirvana,
salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of
religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when
one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the
tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is
why pity appeared to him as a virtue. . . . Aristotle, as every one knows,
saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind, the remedy for which was
an occasional purgative: he regarded tragedy as that purgative. The instinct
of life should prompt us to seek some means of puncturing any such
pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity as that appearing in
Schopenhauer's case (and also, alack, in that of our whole literary
decadence, from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner),
that it may burst and be discharged. . . Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all
our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be the doctors here,
to be unmerciful here, to wield the knife here--all this is
our business, all this is our sort of humanity, by this sign
we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans !--

8.

It is necessary to say just whom we regard as our antagonists:
theologians and all who have any theological blood in their veins--this is
our whole philosophy. . . . One must have faced that menace at close hand,
better still, one must have had experience of it directly and almost
succumbed to it, to realize that it is not to be taken lightly (--the
alleged free-thinking of our naturalists and physiologists seems to me to be
a joke--they have no passion about such things; they have not suffered--).
This poisoning goes a great deal further than most people think: I find the
arrogant habit of the theologian among all who regard themselves as
"idealists"--among all who, by virtue of a higher point of departure, claim
a right to rise above reality, and to look upon it with suspicion. . . The
idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of lofty concepts in his
hand (--and not only in his hand!); he launches them with benevolent
contempt against "understanding," "the senses," "honor," "good living,"
"science"; he sees such things as beneath him, as pernicious and
seductive forces, on which "the soul" soars as a pure thing-in-itself--as if
humility, chastity, poverty, in a word, holiness, had not already
done much more damage to life than all imaginable horrors and vices. . . The
pure soul is a pure lie. . . So long as the priest, that professional
denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted as a higher
variety of man, there can be no answer to the question, What is
truth? Truth has already been stood on its head when the obvious
attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative.

9.

Upon this theological instinct I make war: I find the tracks of it
everywhere. Whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and
dishonourable in all things. The pathetic thing that grows out of this
condition is called faith: in other words, closing one's eyes upon
one's self once for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable
falsehood. People erect a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness upon
this false view of all things; they ground good conscience upon faulty
vision; they argue that no other sort of vision has value any more,
once they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of "God," "salvation"
and "eternity." I unearth this theological instinct in all directions: it is
the most widespread and the most subterranean form of falsehood to be
found on earth. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false:
there you have almost a criterion of truth. His profound instinct of
self-preservation stands against truth ever coming into honour in any way,
or even getting stated. Wherever the influence of theologians is felt there
is a transvaluation of values, and the concepts "true" and "false" are
forced to change places: what ever is most damaging to life is there called
"true," and whatever exalts it, intensifies it, approves it, justifies it
and makes it triumphant is there called "false."... When theologians,
working through the "consciences" of princes (or of peoples--), stretch out
their hands for power, there is never any doubt as to the fundamental
issue: the will to make an end, the nihilistic will exerts that
power...

10.

Among Germans I am immediately understood when I say that theological
blood is the ruin of philosophy. The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of
German philosophy; Protestantism itself is its peccatum originale.
Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of Christianity--and
of reason. ... One need only utter the words "Tubingen School" to get an
understanding of what German philosophy is at bottom--a very artful form of
theology. . . The Suabians are the best liars in Germany; they lie
innocently. . . . Why all the rejoicing over the appearance of Kant that
went through the learned world of Germany, three-fourths of which is made up
of the sons of preachers and teachers--why the German conviction still
echoing, that with Kant came a change for the better? The theological
instinct of German scholars made them see clearly just what had
become possible again. . . . A backstairs leading to the old ideal stood
open; the concept of the "true world," the concept of morality as the
essence of the world (--the two most vicious errors that ever existed!),
were once more, thanks to a subtle and wily scepticism, if not actually
demonstrable, then at least no longer refutable...
Reason, the prerogative of reason, does not go so far. . . Out of
reality there had been made "appearance"; an absolutely false world, that of
being, had been turned into reality. . . . The success of Kant is merely a
theological success; he was, like Luther and Leibnitz, but one more
impediment to German integrity, already far from steady.--

11.

A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our
invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defence. In
every other case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our
life menaces it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the
concept of "virtue," as Kant would have it, is pernicious. "Virtue," "duty,"
"good for its own sake," goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of
universal validity--these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an
expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of
Konigsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound laws of
self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find hisown
virtue, his own categorical imperative. A nation goes to pieces
when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing
works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every "impersonal" duty,
every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.--To think that no one has
thought of Kant's categorical imperative as dangerous to life!...The
theological instinct alone took it under protection !--An action prompted by
the life-instinct proves that it is a right action by the amount of
pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of
Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection . . . What
destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner
necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure--as a mere
automaton of duty? That is the recipe for decadence, and no less for
idiocy. . . Kant became an idiot.--And such a man was the contemporary of
Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German
philosopher--still passes today! . . . I forbid myself to say what I think
of the Germans. . . . Didn't Kant see in the French Revolution the
transformation of the state from the inorganic form to the organic?
Didn't he ask himself if there was a single event that could be
explained save on the assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on the
basis of it, "the tendency of mankind toward the good" could be
explained, once and for all time? Kant's answer: "That is
revolution." Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a
revolt against nature, German decadence as a philosophy--that is
Kant!----

12.

I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of
philosophy: the rest haven't the slightest conception of intellectual
integrity. They behave like women, all these great enthusiasts and
prodigies--they regard "beautiful feelings" as arguments, the "heaving
breast" as the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the criterion
of truth. In the end, with "German" innocence, Kant tried to give a
scientific flavour to this form of corruption, this dearth of intellectual
conscience, by calling it "practical reason." He deliberately invented a
variety of reasons for use on occasions when it was desirable not to trouble
with reason--that is, when morality, when the sublime command "thou shalt,"
was heard. When one recalls the fact that, among all peoples, the
philosopher is no more than a development from the old type of priest, this
inheritance from the priest, this fraud upon self, ceases to be
remarkable. When a man feels that he has a divine mission, say to lift up,
to save or to liberate mankind--when a man feels the divine spark in his
heart and believes that he is the mouthpiece of supernatural
imperatives--when such a mission in. flames him, it is only natural that he
should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment. He feels
that he is himself sanctified by this mission, that he is himself a
type of a higher order! . . . What has a priest to do with philosophy! He
stands far above it!--And hitherto the priest has ruled!--Hehas determined the meaning of "true" and "not true"!

13.

Let us not under-estimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free
spirits, are already a "transvaluation of all values," a visualized
declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of
"true" and "not true." The most valuable intuitions are the last to be
attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine methods.
All the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today,
were the targets for thousands of years of the most profound contempt; if a
man inclined to them he was excluded from the society of "decent" people--he
passed as "an enemy of God," as a scoffer at the truth, as one "possessed."
As a man of science, he belonged to the Chandala2... We have had the whole pathetic stupidity of mankind against
us--their every notion of what the truth ought to be, of what the
service of the truth ought to be--their every "thou shalt" was
launched against us. . . . Our objectives, our methods, our quiet, cautious,
distrustful manner--all appeared to them as absolutely discreditable and
contemptible.--Looking back, one may almost ask one's self with reason if it
was not actually an aesthetic sense that kept men blind so long: what
they demanded of the truth was picturesque effectiveness, and of the learned
a strong appeal to their senses. It was our modesty that stood out
longest against their taste...How well they guessed that, these turkey-cocks
of God!

14.

We have unlearned something. We have be come more modest in every way. We
no longer derive man from the "spirit," from the "god-head"; we have dropped
him back among the beasts. We regard him as the strongest of the beasts
because he is the craftiest; one of the results thereof is his
intellectuality. On the other hand, we guard ourselves against a conceit
which would assert itself even here: that man is the great second thought in
the process of organic evolution. He is, in truth, anything but the crown of
creation: beside him stand many other animals, all at similar stages of
development... And even when we say that we say a bit too much, for man,
relatively speaking, is the most botched of all the animals and the
sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerously from his
instincts--though for all that, to be sure, he remains the most
interesting!--As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who
first had the really admirable daring to describe them as machina;
the whole of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this
doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartes did: what
we know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have
regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his
inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called "free will";
now we have taken even this will from him, for the term no longer describes
anything that we can understand. The old word "will" now connotes only a
sort of result, an individual reaction, that follows inevitably upon a
series of partly discordant and partly harmonious stimuli--the will no
longer "acts," or "moves." . . . Formerly it was thought that man's
consciousness, his "spirit," offered evidence of his high origin, his
divinity. That he might be perfected, he was advised, tortoise-like,
to draw his senses in, to have no traffic with earthly things, to shuffle
off his mortal coil--then only the important part of him, the "pure spirit,"
would remain. Here again we have thought out the thing better: to us
consciousness, or "the spirit," appears as a symptom of a relative
imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping, a
misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force
unnecessarily--we deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it is
done consciously. The "pure spirit" is a piece of pure stupidity: take away
the nervous system and the senses, the so-called "mortal shell," and the
rest is miscalculation--thatis all!...

15.

Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact
with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes ("God" "soul,"
"ego," "spirit," "free will"--or even "unfree"), and purely imaginary
effects ("sin" "salvation" "grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of
sins"). Intercourse between imaginarybeings ("God," "spirits,"
"souls"); an imaginarynatural history (anthropocentric; a total
denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology
(misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or
disagreeable general feelings--for example, of the states of the nervus
sympathicus with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical
balderdash--, "repentance," "pangs of conscience," "temptation by the
devil," "the presence of God"); an imaginaryteleology (the "kingdom
of God," "the last judgment," "eternal life").--This purely fictitious
world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the
world of dreams; the later at least reflects reality, whereas the former
falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it. Once the concept of "nature" had
been opposed to the concept of "God," the word "natural" necessarily took on
the meaning of "abominable"--the whole of that fictitious world has its
sources in hatred of the natural (--the real!--), and is no more than
evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality. . . . This
explains everything. Who alone has any reason for living his way out of
reality? The man who suffers under it. But to suffer from reality one must
be a botched reality. . . . The preponderance of pains over pleasures
is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion: but such a
preponderance also supplies the formula for decadence...

16.

A criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to
the same conclusion.--A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to
its own god. In him it does honour to the conditions which enable it to
survive, to its virtues--it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of
power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich will give
of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make
sacrifices. . . Religion, within these limits, is a form of
gratitude. A man is grateful for his own existence: to that end he needs a
god.--Such a god must be able to work both benefits and injuries; he must be
able to play either friend or foe--he is wondered at for the good he does as
well as for the evil he does. But the castration, against all nature, of
such a god, making him a god of goodness alone, would be contrary to human
inclination. Mankind has just as much need for an evil god as for a good
god; it doesn't have to thank mere tolerance and humanitarianism for its own
existence. . . . What would be the value of a god who knew nothing of anger,
revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence? who had perhaps never experienced
the rapturous ardeurs of victory and of destruction? No one would
understand such a god: why should any one want him?--True enough, when a
nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief in its own future,
its hope of freedom slipping from it, when it begins to see submission as a
first necessity and the virtues of submission as measures of
self-preservation, then it must overhaul its god. He then becomes a
hypocrite, timorous and demure; he counsels "peace of soul," hate-no-more,
leniency, "love" of friend and foe. He moralizes endlessly; he creeps into
every private virtue; he becomes the god of every man; he becomes a private
citizen, a cosmopolitan. . . Formerly he represented a people, the strength
of a people, everything aggressive and thirsty for power in the soul of a
people; now he is simply the good god...The truth is that there is no
other alternative for gods: either they are the will to power--in
which case they are national gods--or incapacity for power--in which case
they have to be good.

17.

Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is
always an accompanying decline physiologically, a decadence. The
divinity of this decadence, shorn of its masculine virtues and
passions, is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded,
of the weak. Of course, they do not call themselves the weak; they
call themselves "the good." . . . No hint is needed to indicate the moments
in history at which the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil god first
became possible. The same instinct which prompts the inferior to reduce
their own god to "goodness-in-itself" also prompts them to eliminate all
good qualities from the god of their superiors; they make revenge on their
masters by making a devil of the latter's god.--The good god,
and the devil like him--both are abortions of decadence.--How can we
be so tolerant of the naïveté of Christian theologians as to join in their
doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god from "the god of Israel,"
the god of a people, to the Christian god, the essence of all goodness, is
to be described as progress?--But even Renan does this. As if Renan
had a right to be naïve! The contrary actually stares one in the face. When
everything necessary to ascending life; when all that is strong,
courageous, masterful and proud has been eliminated from the concept of a
god; when he has sunk step by step to the level of a staff for the weary, a
sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he be comes the poor man's god, the
sinner's god, the invalid's god par excellence, and the attribute of
"saviour" or "redeemer" remains as the one essential attribute of
divinity--just what is the significance of such a metamorphosis? what
does such a reduction of the godhead imply?--To be sure, the "kingdom
of God" has thus grown larger. Formerly he had only his own people, his
"chosen" people. But since then he has gone wandering, like his people
themselves, into foreign parts; he has given up settling down quietly
anywhere; finally he has come to feel at home everywhere, and is the great
cosmopolitan--until now he has the "great majority" on his side, and half
the earth. But this god of the "great majority," this democrat among gods,
has not become a proud heathen god: on the contrary, he remains a Jew, he
remains a god in a corner, a god of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all
the noisesome quarters of the world! . . His earthly kingdom, now as always,
is a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto
kingdom. . . And he himself is so pale, so weak, so decadent .
. . Even the palest of the pale are able to master him--messieurs the
metaphysicians, those albinos of the intellect. They spun their webs around
him for so long that finally he was hypnotized, and began to spin himself,
and became another metaphysician. Thereafter he resumed once more his old
business of spinning the world out of his inmost being sub specie
Spinozae; thereafter he be came ever thinner and paler--became the
"ideal," became "pure spirit," became "the absolute," became "the
thing-in-itself." . . . The collapse of a god: he became a
"thing-in-itself."

18.

The Christian concept of a god--the god as the patron of the sick, the
god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit--is one of the most corrupt
concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably touches
low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. God degenerated into
the contradiction of life. Instead of being its transfiguration and
eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to live!
God becomes the formula for every slander upon the "here and now," and for
every lie about the "beyond"! In him nothingness is deified, and the will to
nothingness is made holy! . . .

19.

The fact that the strong races of northern Europe did not repudiate this
Christian god does little credit to their gift for religion--and not much
more to their taste. They ought to have been able to make an end of such a
moribund and worn-out product of the decadence. A curse lies upon
them because they were not equal to it; they made illness, decrepitude and
contradiction a part of their instincts--and since then they have not
managed to create any more gods. Two thousand years have come and
gone--and not a single new god! Instead, there still exists, and as if by
some intrinsic right,--as if he were the ultimatum and maximum
of the power to create gods, of the creator spiritus in
mankind--this pitiful god of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid image of
decay, conjured up out of emptiness, contradiction and vain imagining, in
which all the instincts of decadence, all the cowardices and
wearinesses of the soul find their sanction!--

20.

In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a
related religion with an even larger number of believers: I allude to
Buddhism. Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic
religions--they are both decadence religions--but they are separated
from each other in a very remarkable way. For the fact that he is able to
compare them at all the critic of Christianity is indebted to the
scholars of India.--Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as
Christianity--it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face
problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of
philosophical speculation. The concept, "god," was already disposed of
before it appeared. Buddhism is the only genuinely positive religion
to be encountered in history, and this applies even to its epistemology
(which is a strict phenomenalism) --It does not speak of a "struggle with
sin," but, yielding to reality, of the "struggle with suffering." Sharply
differentiating itself from Christianity, it puts the self-deception that
lies in moral concepts be hind it; it is, in my phrase,beyond good
and evil.--The two physiological facts upon which it grounds itself and upon
which it bestows its chief attention are: first, an excessive sensitiveness
to sensation, which manifests itself as a refined susceptibility to pain,
and secondly, an extraordinary spirituality, a too protracted concern
with concepts and logical procedures, under the influence of which the
instinct of personality has yielded to a notion of the "impersonal." (--Both
of these states will be familiar to a few of my readers, the objectivists,
by experience, as they are to me). These physiological states produced a
depression, and Buddha tried to combat it by hygienic measures.
Against it he prescribed a life in the open, a life of travel; moderation in
eating and a careful selection of foods; caution in the use of intoxicants;
the same caution in arousing any of the passions that foster a bilious habit
and heat the blood; finally, no worry, either on one's own account or
on account of others. He encourages ideas that make for either quiet
contentment or good cheer--he finds means to combat ideas of other sorts. He
understands good, the state of goodness, as something which promotes health.
Prayer is not included, and neither is asceticism. There is no
categorical imperative nor any disciplines, even within the walls of a
monastery (--it is always possible to leave--). These things would have been
simply means of increasing the excessive sensitiveness above mentioned. For
the same reason he does not advocate any conflict with unbelievers; his
teaching is antagonistic to nothing so much as to revenge, aversion,
ressentiment (--"enmity never brings an end to enmity": the moving
refrain of all Buddhism. . .) And in all this he was right, for it is
precisely these passions which, in view of his main regiminal purpose, are
unhealthful. The mental fatigue that he observes, already plainly
displayed in too much "objectivity" (that is, in the individual's loss of
interest in himself, in loss of balance and of "egoism"), he combats by
strong efforts to lead even the spiritual interests back to the ego.
In Buddha's teaching egoism is a duty. The "one thing needful," the
question "how can you be delivered from suffering," regulates and determines
the whole spiritual diet. (--Perhaps one will here recall that Athenian who
also declared war upon pure "scientificality," to wit, Socrates, who also
elevated egoism to the estate of a morality) .

21.

The things necessary to Buddhism are a very mild climate, customs of
great gentleness and liberality, and no militarism; moreover, it must
get its start among the higher and better educated classes. Cheerfulness,
quiet and the absence of desire are the chief desiderata, and they are
attained. Buddhism is not a religion in which perfection is merely an
object of aspiration: perfection is actually normal.--Under Christianity the
instincts of the subjugated and the oppressed come to the fore: it is only
those who are at the bottom who seek their salvation in it. Here the
prevailing pastime, the favourite remedy for boredom is the discussion of
sin, self-criticism, the inquisition of conscience; here the emotion
produced by power (called "God") is pumped up (by prayer); here the
highest good is regarded as unattainable, as a gift, as "grace." Here, too,
open dealing is lacking; concealment and the darkened room are Christian.
Here body is despised and hygiene is denounced as sensual; the church even
ranges itself against cleanliness (--the first Christian order after the
banishment of the Moors closed the public baths, of which there were 270 in
Cordova alone) . Christian, too; is a certain cruelty toward one's self and
toward others; hatred of unbelievers; the will to persecute. Sombre and
disquieting ideas are in the foreground; the most esteemed states of mind,
bearing the most respectable names are epileptoid; the diet is so regulated
as to engender morbid symptoms and over-stimulate the nerves. Christian,
again, is all deadly enmity to the rulers of the earth, to the
"aristocratic"--along with a sort of secret rivalry with them (--one resigns
one's "body" to them--one wantsonly one's "soul" . . . ). And
Christian is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage of freedom,
of intellectual libertinage; Christian is all hatred of the senses,
of joy in the senses, of joy in general . . .

22.

When Christianity departed from its native soil, that of the lowest
orders, the underworld of the ancient world, and began seeking power
among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal with exhausted men,
but with men still inwardly savage and capable of self torture--in brief,
strong men, but bungled men. Here, unlike in the case of the Buddhists, the
cause of discontent with self, suffering through self, is not merely a
general sensitiveness and susceptibility to pain, but, on the contrary, an
inordinate thirst for inflicting pain on others, a tendency to obtain
subjective satisfaction in hostile deeds and ideas. Christianity had to
embrace barbaric concepts and valuations in order to obtain mastery
over barbarians: of such sort, for example, are the sacrifices of the
first-born, the drinking of blood as a sacrament, the disdain of the
intellect and of culture; torture in all its forms, whether bodily or not;
the whole pomp of the cult. Buddhism is a religion for peoples in a further
state of development, for races that have become kind, gentle and
over-spiritualized (--Europe is not yet ripe for it--): it is a summons
'that takes them back to peace and cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of
the spirit, to a certain hardening of the body. Christianity aims at
mastering beasts of prey; its modus operandi is to make them
ill--to make feeble is the Christian recipe for taming, for
"civilizing." Buddhism is a religion for the closing, over-wearied stages of
civilization. Christianity appears before civilization has so much as
begun--under certain circumstances it lays the very foundations thereof.

23.

Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more
objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility
to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin--it simply says,
as it simply thinks, "I suffer." To the barbarian, however, suffering in
itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all, is an
explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to
deny his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here the word
"devil" was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent and terrible
enemy--there was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an
enemy.

--At the bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that belong
to the Orient. In the first place, it knows that it is of very little
consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is believed
to be true. Truth and faith: here we have two wholly distinct
worlds of ideas, almost two diametrically opposite worlds--the road
to the one and the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand that
fact thoroughly--this is almost enough, in the Orient, to make one a
sage. The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it, every student of the esoteric
knows it. When, for example, a man gets any pleasure out of the
notion that he has been saved from sin, it is not necessary for him to be
actually sinful, but merely to feel sinful. But when faith is
thus exalted above everything else, it necessarily follows that reason,
knowledge and patient inquiry have to be discredited: the road to the truth
becomes a forbidden road.--Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more
powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be.
Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with
actuality can dash it--so high, indeed, that no fulfillment can satisfy
it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. (Precisely because of this
power that hope has of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks regarded it
as the evil of evils, as the most malign of evils; it remained behind
at the source of all evil.)3--In order that love may be possible, God must become a
person; in order that the lower instincts may take a hand in the matter God
must be young. To satisfy the ardor of the woman a beautiful saint must
appear on the scene, and to satisfy that of the men there must be a virgin.
These things are necessary if Christianity is to assume lordship over a soil
on which some aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult has already established a notion
as to what a cult ought to be. To insist upon chastity greatly
strengthens the vehemence and subjectivity of the religious instinct--it
makes the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.--Love is the state
in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not. The force of
illusion reaches its highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening,
for transfiguring. When a man is in love he endures more than at any
other time; he submits to anything. The problem was to devise a religion
which would allow one to love: by this means the worst that life has to
offer is overcome--it is scarcely even noticed.--So much for the three
Christian virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the three Christian
ingenuities.--Buddhism is in too late a stage of development, too
full of positivism, to be shrewd in any such way.--

24.

Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin of
Christianity. The first thing necessary to its solution is this: that
Christianity is to be understood only by examining the soil from which it
sprung--it is not a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their
inevitable product; it is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of
the Jews. In the words of the Saviour, "salvation is of the Jews." 4--The second thing to remember is this: that the
psychological type of the Galilean is still to be recognized, but it was
only in its most degenerate form (which is at once maimed and overladen with
foreign features) that it could serve in the manner in which it has been
used: as a type of the Saviour of mankind.

--The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world,
for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be, they
chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at anyprice:
this price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all
naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the
outer. They put themselves against all those conditions under which,
hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been permitted
to live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct
opposition to natural conditions--one by one they distorted religion,
civilization, morality, history and psychology until each became a
contradiction of its natural significance. We meet with the same
phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a
copy: the Christian church, put beside the "people of God," shows a complete
lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews are the
most fateful people in the history of the world: their influence has
so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that today the
Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it is no more
than the final consequence of Judaism.

In my "Genealogy of Morals" I give the first psychological explanation of
the concepts underlying those two antithetical things, a noble
morality and a ressentiment morality, the second of which is a
mere product of the denial of the former. The Judaeo-Christian moral system
belongs to the second division, and in every detail. In order to be able to
say Nay to everything representing an ascending evolution of
life--that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval--the
instincts of ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to
invent an other world in which the acceptance of life appeared
as the most evil and abominable thing imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews
are a people gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when
they found themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose
voluntarily, and with a profound talent for self-preservation, the side of
all those instincts which make for decadence--not as if mastered by
them, but as if detecting in them a power by which "the world" could be
defied. The Jews are the very opposite of decadents: they have
simply been forced into appearing in that guise, and with a degree of
skill approaching the non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have
managed to put themselves at the head of all decadent movements
(--for example, the Christianity of Paul--), and so make of them something
stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life. To the sort of men who
reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity,--that is to say, to the
priestly class-decadence is no more than a means to an end.
Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in
confusing the values of "good" and "bad," "true" and "false" in a manner
that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it.

25.

The history of Israel is invaluable as a typical history of an attempt to
denaturize all natural values: I point to five facts which bear this
out. Originally, and above all in the time of the monarchy, Israel
maintained the right attitude of things, which is to say, the natural
attitude. Its Jahveh was an expression of its consciousness of power, its
joy in itself, its hopes for itself: to him the Jews looked for victory and
salvation and through him they expected nature to give them whatever was
necessary to their existence--above all, rain. Jahveh is the god of Israel,
and consequently the god of justice: this is the logic of every race
that has power in its hands and a good conscience in the use of it. In the
religious ceremonial of the Jews both aspects of this self-approval stand
revealed. The nation is grateful for the high destiny that has enabled it to
obtain dominion; it is grateful for the benign procession of the seasons,
and for the good fortune attending its herds and its crops.--This view of
things remained an ideal for a long while, even after it had been robbed of
validity by tragic blows: anarchy within and the Assyrian without. But the
people still retained, as a projection of their highest yearnings, that
vision of a king who was at once a gallant warrior and an upright judge--a
vision best visualized in the typical prophet (i.e., critic and
satirist of the moment), Isaiah. --But every hope remained unfulfilled. The
old god no longer could do what he used to do. He ought to have been
abandoned. But what actually happened? simply this: the conception of him
was changed--the conception of him was denaturized; this was
the price that had to be paid for keeping him.--Jahveh, the god of
"justice"--he is in accord with Israel no more, he no longer
visualizes the national egoism; he is now a god only conditionally. . . The
public notion of this god now becomes merely a weapon in the hands of
clerical agitators, who interpret all happiness as a reward and all
unhappiness as a punishment for obedience or disobedience to him, for "sin":
that most fraudulent of all imaginable interpretations, whereby a "moral
order of the world" is set up, and the fundamental concepts, "cause" and
"effect," are stood on their heads. Once natural causation has been swept
out of the world by doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of
unnatural causation becomes necessary: and all other varieties of the
denial of nature follow it. A god who demands--in place of a god who
helps, who gives counsel, who is at bottom merely a name for every happy
inspiration of courage and self-reliance. . . Morality is no longer a
reflection of the conditions which make for the sound life and development
of the people; it is no longer the primary life-instinct; instead it has
become abstract and in opposition to life--a fundamental perversion of the
fancy, an "evil eye" on all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian
morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the idea
of "sin"; well-being represented as a danger, as a "temptation"; a
physiological disorder produced by the canker worm of conscience...

26.

The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified ;--but
even here Jewish priest craft did not stop. The whole history of Israel
ceased to be of any value: out with it!--These priests accomplished that
miracle of falsification of which a great part of the Bible is the
documentary evidence; with a degree of contempt unparalleled, and in the
face of all tradition and all historical reality, they translated the past
of their people into religious terms, which is to say, they converted
it into an idiotic mechanism of salvation, whereby all offences against
Jahveh were punished and all devotion to him was rewarded. We would regard
this act of historical falsification as something far more shameful if
familiarity with the ecclesiastical interpretation of history for
thousands of years had not blunted our inclinations for uprightness in
historicis. And the philosophers support the church: the lie
about a "moral order of the world" runs through the whole of philosophy,
even the newest. What is the meaning of a "moral order of the world"? That
there is a thing called the will of God which, once and for all time,
determines what man ought to do and what he ought not to do; that the worth
of a people, or of an individual thereof, is to he measured by the extent to
which they or he obey this will of God; that the destinies of a people or of
an individual arecontrolled by this will of God, which rewards or
punishes according to the degree of obedience manifested.--In place of all
that pitiable lie reality has this to say: the priest, a
parasitical variety of man who can exist only at the cost of every sound
view of life, takes the name of God in vain: he calls that state of human
society in which he himself determines the value of all things "the kingdom
of God"; he calls the means whereby that state of affairs is attained "the
will of God"; with cold-blooded cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages
and all individuals by the extent of their subservience or opposition to the
power of the priestly order. One observes him at work: under the hand of the
Jewish priesthood the great age of Israel became an age of decline;
the Exile, with its long series of misfortunes, was transformed into a
punishment for that great age-during which priests had not yet come
into existence. Out of the powerful and wholly free heroes of
Israel's history they fashioned, according to their changing needs, either
wretched bigots and hypocrites or men entirely "godless." They reduced every
great event to the idiotic formula: "obedient or disobedient to
God."--They went a step further: the "will of God" (in other words some
means necessary for preserving the power of the priests) had to be
determined--and to this end they had to have a "revelation." In plain
English, a gigantic literary fraud had to be perpetrated, and "holy
scriptures" had to be concocted--and so, with the utmost hierarchical pomp,
and days of penance and much lamentation over the long days of "sin" now
ended, they were duly published. The "will of God," it appears, had long
stood like a rock; the trouble was that mankind had neglected the "holy
scriptures". . . But the ''will of God'' had already been revealed to
Moses. . . . What happened? Simply this: the priest had formulated, once and
for all time and with the strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to be
paid to him, from the largest to the smallest (--not forgetting the most
appetizing cuts of meat, for the priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks);
in brief, he let it be known just what he wanted, what "the will of
God" was.... From this time forward things were so arranged that the priest
became indispensable everywhere; at all the great natural events of
life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the
"sacrifice" (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite put in his
appearance, and proceeded to denaturize it--in his own phrase, to
"sanctify" it. . . . For this should be noted: that every natural habit,
every natural institution (the state, the administration of justice,
marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), everything demanded by the
life-instinct, in short, everything that has any value in itself, is
reduced to absolute worthlessness and even made the reverse of
valuable by the parasitism of priests (or, if you chose, by the "moral order
of the world"). The fact requires a sanction--a power to grant values
becomes necessary, and the only way it can create such values is by
denying nature. . . . The priest depreciates and desecrates nature: it is
only at this price that he can exist at all.--Disobedience to God, which
actually means to the priest, to "the law," now gets the name of "sin"; the
means prescribed for "reconciliation with God" are, of course, precisely the
means which bring one most effectively under the thumb of the priest; he
alone can "save". Psychologically considered, "sins" are indispensable to
every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only
reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is
necessary to him that there be "sinning". . . . Prime axiom: "God forgiveth
him that repenteth"--in plain English, him that submitteth to the
priest.

27.

Christianity sprang from a soil so corrupt that on it everything natural,
every natural value, every reality was opposed by the deepest
instincts of the ruling class--it grew up as a sort of war to the death upon
reality, and as such it has never been surpassed. The "holy people," who had
adopted priestly values and priestly names for all things, and who, with a
terrible logical consistency, had rejected everything of the earth as
"unholy," "worldly," "sinful"--this people put its instinct into a final
formula that was logical to the point of self-annihilation:
asChristianity it actually denied even the last form of reality, the
"holy people," the "chosen people," Jewish reality itself. The
phenomenon is of the first order of importance: the small insurrectionary
movement which took the name of Jesus of Nazareth is simply the Jewish
instinct redivivus--in other words, it is the priestly instinct come
to such a pass that it can no longer endure the priest as a fact; it is the
discovery of a state of existence even more fantastic than any before it, of
a vision of life even more unreal than that necessary to an
ecclesiastical organization. Christianity actually denies the
church...

I am unable to determine what was the target of the insurrection said to
have been led (whether rightly or wrongly) by Jesus, if it was not
the Jewish church--"church" being here used in exactly the same sense that
the word has today. It was an insurrection against the "good and just,"
against the "prophets of Israel," against the whole hierarchy of
society--not against corruption, but against caste, privilege, order,
formalism. It was unbelief in "superior men," a Nay flung at
everything that priests and theologians stood for. But the hierarchy that
was called into question, if only for an instant, by this movement was the
structure of piles which, above everything, was necessary to the safety of
the Jewish people in the midst of the "waters"--it represented theirlast
possibility of survival; it was the final residuum of their
independent political existence; an attack upon it was an attack upon the
most profound national instinct, the most powerful national will to live,
that has ever appeared on earth. This saintly anarchist, who aroused the
people of the abyss, the outcasts and "sinners," the Chandala of Judaism, to
rise in revolt against the established order of things--and in language
which, if the Gospels are to be credited, would get him sent to Siberia
today--this man was certainly a political criminal, at least in so far as it
was possible to be one in so absurdly unpolitical a community. This
is what brought him to the cross: the proof thereof is to be found in the
inscription that was put upon the cross. He died for his own
sins--there is not the slightest ground for believing, no matter how
often it is asserted, that he died for the sins of others.--

28.

As to whether he himself was conscious of this contradiction--whether, in
fact, this was the only contradiction he was cognizant of--that is quite
another question. Here, for the first time, I touch upon the problem of the
psychology of the Saviour.--I confess, to begin with, that there are
very few books which offer me harder reading than the Gospels. My
difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned
curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable
triumphs. It is a long while since I, like all other young scholars, enjoyed
with all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist the work of
the incomparable Strauss.5At that time I was twenty years old: now I am too serious for
that sort of thing. What do I care for the contradictions of "tradition"?
How can any one call pious legends "traditions"? The histories of saints
present the most dubious variety of literature in existence; to examine them
by the scientific method, in the entire absence of corroborative
documents, seems to me to condemn the whole inquiry from the start--it
is simply learned idling.

29.

What concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour. This
type might be depicted in the Gospels, in however mutilated a form and
however much overladen with extraneous characters--that is, in spite
of the Gospels; just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in
his legends in spite of his legends. It is not a question of mere
truthful evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually died;
the question is, whether his type is still conceivable, whether it has been
handed down to us.--All the attempts that I know of to read the history
of a "soul" in the Gospels seem to me to reveal only a lamentable
psychological levity. M. Renan, that mountebank in psychologicus, has
contributed the two most unseemly notions to this business of
explaining the type of Jesus: the notion of the genius and that of
the hero ("heros"). But if there is anything essentially
unevangelical, it is surely the concept of the hero. What the Gospels make
instinctive is precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of all taste
for conflict: the very incapacity for resistance is here converted into
something moral: ("resist not evil !"--the most profound sentence in the
Gospels, perhaps the true key to them), to wit, the blessedness of peace, of
gentleness, the inability to be an enemy. What is the meaning of
"glad tidings"?--The true life, the life eternal has been found--it is not
merely promised, it is here, it is in you; it is the life that lies
in love free from all retreats and exclusions, from all keeping of
distances. Every one is the child of God--Jesus claims nothing for himself
alone--as the child of God each man is the equal of every other man. . .
.Imagine making Jesus a hero!--And what a tremendous misunderstanding
appears in the word "genius"! Our whole conception of the "spiritual," the
whole conception of our civilization, could have had no meaning in the world
that Jesus lived in. In the strict sense of the physiologist, a quite
different word ought to be used here. . . . We all know that there is a
morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which causes those suffering from
it to recoil from every touch, and from every effort to grasp a solid
object. Brought to its logical conclusion, such a physiological habitus
becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into the
"intangible," into the "incomprehensible"; a distaste for all formulae, for
all conceptions of time and space, for everything established--customs,
institutions, the church--; a feeling of being at home in a world in which
no sort of reality survives, a merely "inner" world, a "true" world, an
"eternal" world. . . . "The Kingdom of God is withinyou". . . .

30.

The instinctive hatred of reality: the consequence of an extreme
susceptibility to pain and irritation--so great that merely to be "touched"
becomes unendurable, for every sensation is too profound.

The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds
and distances in feeling: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility
to pain and irritation--so great that it senses all resistance, all
compulsion to resistance, as unbearable anguish (--that is to say, as
harmful, as prohibited by the instinct of self-preservation),
and regards blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer
necessary to offer resistance to anybody or anything, however evil or
dangerous--love, as the only, as the ultimate possibility of life. .
.

These are the two physiological realities upon and out of which
the doctrine of salvation has sprung. I call them a sublime
super-development of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. What
stands most closely related to them, though with a large admixture of Greek
vitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism, the theory of salvation of
paganism. Epicurus was a typical decadent: I was the first to
recognize him.--The fear of pain, even of infinitely slight pain--the end of
this can be nothing save a religion of love. . . .

31.

I have already given my answer to the problem. The prerequisite to it is
the assumption that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in a greatly
distorted form. This distortion is very probable: there are many reasons why
a type of that sort should not be handed down in a pure form, complete and
free of additions. The milieu in which this strange figure moved must have
left marks upon him, and more must have been imprinted by the history, the
destiny, of the early Christian communities; the latter indeed, must
have embellished the type retrospectively with characters which can be
understood only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda. That
strange and sickly world into which the Gospels lead us--a world apparently
out of a Russian novel, in which the scum of society, nervous maladies and
"childish" idiocy keep a tryst--must, in any case, have coarsened the
type: the first disciples, in particular, must have been forced to translate
an existence visible only in symbols and incomprehensibilities into their
own crudity, in order to understand it at all--in their sight the type could
take on reality only after it had been recast in a familiar mould.... The
prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of morals, the worker of
wonders, John the Baptist--all these merely presented chances to
misunderstand it . . . . Finally, let us not underrate the proprium
of all great, and especially all sectarian veneration: it tends to erase
from the venerated objects all its original traits and idiosyncrasies, often
so painfully strange--it does not even see them. It is greatly to be
regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most
interesting decadent--I mean some one who would have felt the
poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and the
childish. In the last analysis, the type, as a type of the decadence,
may actually have been peculiarly complex and contradictory: such a
possibility is not to be lost sight of. Nevertheless, the probabilities seem
to be against it, for in that case tradition would have been particularly
accurate and objective, whereas we have reasons for assuming the contrary.
Meanwhile, there is a contradiction between the peaceful preacher of the
mount, the sea-shore and the fields, who appears like a new Buddha on a soil
very unlike India's, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy of
theologians and ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renan's malice as
"le grand maitre en ironie." I myself haven't any doubt that the
greater part of this venom (and no less of esprit) got itself into
the concept of the Master only as a result of the excited nature of
Christian propaganda: we all know the unscrupulousness of sectarians when
they set out to turn their leader into an apologia for themselves.
When the early Christians had need of an adroit, contentious, pugnacious and
maliciously subtle theologian to tackle other theologians, they created
a "god" that met that need, just as they put into his mouth without
hesitation certain ideas that were necessary to them but that were utterly
at odds with the Gospels--"the second coming," "the last judgment," all
sorts of expectations and promises, current at the time.--

32.

I can only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to intrude the
fanatic into the figure of the Saviour: the very word imperieux, used
by Renan, is alone enough to annul the type. What the "glad tidings"
tell us is simply that there are no more contradictions; the kingdom of
heaven belongs to children; the faith that is voiced here is no more
an embattled faith--it is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is a
sort of recrudescent childishness of the spirit. The physiologists, at all
events, are familiar with such a delayed and incomplete puberty in the
living organism, the result of degeneration. A faith of this sort is not
furious, it does not denounce, it does not defend itself: it does not come
with "the sword"--it does not realize how it will one day set man against
man. It does not manifest itself either by miracles, or by rewards and
promises, or by "scriptures": it is itself, first and last, its own miracle,
its own reward, its own promise, its own "kingdom of God." This faith does
not formulate itself--it simply lives, and so guards itself against
formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background
gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity
one finds only concepts of a Judaeo--Semitic character (--that of
eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category--an idea
which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church).
But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical
language, semantics6 an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory
that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to
speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts
of Sankhya,7and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse 8--and in neither case would it have made any difference to
him.--With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call
Jesus a "free spirit"9--he cares nothing for what is established: the word
killeth,10 a whatever is established killeth. 'The idea of
"life" as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to
his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks
only of inner things: "life" or "truth" or "light" is his word for the
innermost--in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature,
even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory. --Here it is of
paramount importance to be led into no error by the temptations lying in
Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism
par excellence stands outside all religion, all notions of worship,
all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge, all
politics, all psychology, all books, all art--his "wisdom" is precisely a
pure ignorance11 of all such things. He has never heard of culture; he
doesn't have to make war on it--he doesn't even deny it. . . The same thing
may be said of the state, of the whole bourgeoise social order, of labour,
of war--he has no ground for denying" the world," for he knows nothing of
the ecclesiastical concept of "the world" . . . Denial is precisely
the thing that is impossible to him.--In the same way he lacks argumentative
capacity, and has no belief that an article of faith, a "truth," may be
established by proofs (--his proofs are inner "lights," subjective
sensations of happiness and self-approval, simple "proofs of power"--). Such
a doctrine cannot contradict: it doesn't know that other doctrines
exist, or can exist, and is wholly incapable of imagining anything
opposed to it. . . If anything of the sort is ever encountered, it laments
the "blindness" with sincere sympathy--for it alone has "light"--but it does
not offer objections . . .

33.

In the whole psychology of the "Gospels" the concepts of guilt and
punishment are lacking, and so is that of reward. "Sin," which means
anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolished--this is
precisely the "glad tidings." Eternal bliss is not merely promised,
nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the only
reality--what remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it.

The results of such a point of view project themselves into a new
way of life, the special evangelical way of life. It is not a
"belief" that marks off the Christian; he is distinguished by a different
mode of action; he acts differently. He offers no resistance, either
by word or in his heart, to those who stand against him. He draws no
distinction between strangers and countrymen, Jews and Gentiles
("neighbour," of course, means fellow-believer, Jew). He is angry with no
one, and he despises no one. He neither appeals to the courts of justice nor
heeds their mandates ("Swear not at all") .12 He never under any circumstances divorces his wife, even when
he has proofs of her infidelity.--And under all of this is one principle;
all of it arises from one instinct.--

The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of
life--and so was his death. . . He no longer needed any formula or ritual in
his relations with God--not even prayer. He had rejected the whole of the
Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he knew that it was only
by a way of life that one could feel one's self "divine," "blessed,"
"evangelical," a "child of God."Not by "repentance,"not by
"prayer and forgiveness" is the way to God: only theGospel way
leads to God--it is itself "God!"--What the Gospels abolished
was the Judaism in the concepts of "sin," "forgiveness of sin," "faith,"
"salvation through faith"--the wholeecclesiastical dogma of the Jews
was denied by the "glad tidings."

The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that
he will feel that he is "in heaven" and is "immortal," despite many reasons
for feeling that he isnot "in heaven": this is the only psychological
reality in "salvation."--A new way of life, not a new faith.

34.

If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this:
that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as
"truths"--hat he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal,
spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The
concept of "the Son of God" does not connote a concrete person in history,
an isolated and definite individual, but an "eternal" fact, a psychological
symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the
highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the "kingdom of
God," and of the "sonship of God." Nothing could he more un-Christian than
the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a person, of a
"kingdom of God" that is to come, of a "kingdom of heaven" beyond, and of a
"son of God" as the second person of the Trinity. All this--if I may
be forgiven the phrase--is like thrusting one's fist into the eye (and what
an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to
world-historical cynicism. . . .But it is nevertheless obvious enough
what is meant by the symbols "Father" and "Son"--not, of course, to every
one--: the word "Son" expresses entrance into the feeling that there
is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and "Father"
expresses that feeling itself--the sensation of eternity and of
perfection.--I am ashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this
symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story13 at the threshold of the Christian "faith"? And a dogma of
"immaculate conception" for good measure? . . --And thereby it has robbed
conception of its immaculateness--

The "kingdom of heaven" is a state of the heart--not something to come
"beyond the world" or "after death." The whole idea of natural death is
absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is
absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world,
useful only as a symbol. The "hour of death" isnot a Christian
idea--"hours," time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for
the bearer of "glad tidings." . . .

The "kingdom of God" is not something that men wait for: it had no
yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a
"millennium"--it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is
nowhere. . . .

35.

This "bearer of glad tidings" died as he lived and taught--not to
"save mankind," but to show mankind how to live. It was a way of life
that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the
officers, before his accusers--his demeanour on the cross. He does
not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off
the most extreme penalty--more, he invites it. . . And he prays,
suffers and loves with those, in those, who do him evil . . .
Not to defend one's self, not to show anger, not to lay
blames. . . On the contrary, to submit even to the Evil One--to love
him. . . .

36.

--We free spirits--we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to
understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood--that instinct and
passion for integrity which makes war upon the "holy lie" even more than
upon all other lies. . . Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and
cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes
possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men always
sought, with shameless egoism, was their own advantage therein; they
created the church out of denial of the Gospels. . . .

Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity's hand in the great
drama of existence would find no small indication thereof in the
stupendous question-mark that is called Christianity. That mankind
should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin,
the meaning and the law of the Gospels--that in the concept of the
"church" the very things should be pronounced holy that the "bearer of glad
tidings" regards as beneath him and behind him--it would be
impossible to surpass this as a grand example of world-historical irony--

37.

--Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it delude
itself into believing that the crude fable of the wonder-worker and
Saviour constituted the beginnings of Christianity--and that everything
spiritual and symbolical in it only came later? Quite to the contrary, the
whole history of Christianity--from the death on the cross onward--is the
history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an original
symbolism. With every extension of Christianity among larger and ruder
masses, even less capable of grasping the principles that gave birth to it,
the need arose to make it more and more vulgar and
barbarous--itabsorbed the teachings and rites of all the
subterranean cults of the imperium Romanum, and the
absurdities engendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. It was the fate of
Christianity that its faith had to become as sickly, as low and as vulgar as
the needs were sickly, low and vulgar to which it had to administer. A
sickly barbarism finally lifts itself to power as the church--the
church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, to all
loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous and
kindly humanity.--Christian values--noble values: it is only
we, we free spirits, who have re-established this greatest of all
antitheses in values!. . . .

38.

--I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited
by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy--contempt of man.
Let me leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I
despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am unhappily
contemporaneous. The man of today--I am suffocated by his foul breath! . . .
Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is
to say, generous self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through
whole millenniums of this mad house of a world, call it "Christianity,"
"Christian faith" or the "Christian church," as you will--I take care not to
hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks
out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times,our times. Our age
knows better. . . What was formerly merely sickly now becomes
indecent--it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here my disgust
begins.--I look about me: not a word survives of what was once called
"truth"; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even a
man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that
a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but
actually lies--and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie
through "innocence" or "ignorance." The priest knows, as every one knows,
that there is no longer any "God," or any "sinner," or any "Saviour"--that
"free will" and the "moral order of the world" are lies--: serious
reflection, the profound self-conquest of the spirit,allow no man to
pretend that he does not know it. . . All the ideas of the
church are now recognized for what they are--as the worst counterfeits in
existence, invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest
himself is seen as he actually is--as the most dangerous form of parasite,
as the venomous spider of creation. . - - We know, our conscience now
knows--just what the real value of all those sinister inventions of
priest and church has been and what ends they have served, with their
debasement of humanity to a state of self-pollution, the very sight of which
excites loathing,--the concepts "the other world," "the last judgment," "the
immortality of the soul," the "soul" itself: they are all merely so many in
instruments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes
master and remains master. . .Every one knows this,but nevertheless
things remain as before. What has become of the last trace of
decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an
unconventional class of men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now
call themselves Christians and go to the communion table? . . . A prince at
the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and
arrogance of his people--and yet acknowledging, without any shame,
that he is a Christian! . . . Whom, then, does Christianity deny? what
does it call "the world"? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a
patriot; to defend one's self; to be careful of one's honour; to desire
one's own advantage; to be proud . . . every act of everyday, every
instinct, every valuation that shows itself in a deed, is now
anti-Christian: what a monster of falsehood the modern man must be to
call himself nevertheless, and without shame, a Christian!--

39.

--I shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic history of
Christianity.--The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding--at bottom
there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The "Gospels"
died on the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called the
"Gospels" was the very reverse of what he had lived: "bad tidings," a
Dysangelium.14It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in "faith,"
and particularly in faith in salvation through Christ, the distinguishing
mark of the Christian: only the Christian way of life, the life
lived by him who died on the cross, is Christian. . . To this day
such a life is still possible, and for certain men even
necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will remain possible in all ages.
. . . Not faith, but acts; above all, an avoidance of acts, a
different state of being. . . . States of consciousness, faith of a
sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as true--as every
psychologist knows, the value of these things is perfectly indifferent and
fifth-rate compared to that of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole
concept of intellectual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, the
state of Christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon of
consciousness, is to formulate the negation of Christianity. In fact,
there are no Christians. The "Christian"--he who for two thousand years
has passed as a Christian--is simply a psychological self-delusion. Closely
examined, it appears that, despite all his "faith," he has been ruled
only by his instincts--and what instincts!--In all ages--for
example, in the case of Luther--"faith" has been no more than a cloak, a
pretense, a curtain behind which the instincts have played their
game--a shrewd blindness to the domination of certain of the
instincts . . .I have already called "faith" the specially Christian form of
shrewdness--peoplealways talk of their "faith"and act according to their instincts. . . In the world of ideas
of the Christian there is nothing that so much as touches reality: on the
contrary, one recognizes an instinctive hatred of reality as the
motive power, the only motive power at the bottom of Christianity. What
follows therefrom? That even here, in psychologicis, there is a
radical error, which is to say one conditioning fundamentals, which is to
say, one in substance. Take away one idea and put a genuine reality
in its place--and the whole of Christianity crumbles to nothingness
!--Viewed calmly, this strangest of all phenomena, a religion not only
depending on errors, but inventive and ingenious only in devising
injurious errors, poisonous to life and to the heart--this remains a
spectacle for the gods--for those gods who are also philosophers, and
whom I have encountered, for example, in the celebrated dialogues at Naxos.
At the moment when their disgust leaves them (--and us!) they will be
thankful for the spectacle afforded by the Christians: perhaps because of
this curious exhibition alone the wretched little planet called the
earth deserves a glance from omnipotence, a show of divine interest. . . .
Therefore, let us not underestimate the Christians: the Christian, false
to the point of innocence, is far above the ape--in its application
to the Christians a well--known theory of descent becomes a mere piece of
politeness. . . .

40.

--The fate of the Gospels was decided by death--it hung on the "cross.".
. . It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the
cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only--it was only this
appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real
riddle: "Who was it? what was it?"--The feeling of dismay, of
profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a
refutation of their cause; the terrible question, "Why just in this
way?"--this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything
must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a
reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all
chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: "Who put him to death?
who was his natural enemy?"--this question flashed like a lightning-stroke.
Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found
one's self in revolt against the established order, and began to
understand Jesus as in revolt against the established order. Until
then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had
been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite.
Obviously, the little community had not understood what was precisely the
most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the
freedom from and superiority to every feeling of ressentiment--aplain indication of how little he was understood at all! All that Jesus
could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest
possible proof, or example, of his teachings in the most public
manner. But his disciples were very far from forgiving his
death--though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in the
highest degree; and neither were they prepared to offer themselves,
with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death. . . . On the
contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge,
that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the cause should
perish with his death: "recompense" and "judgment" became necessary (--yet
what could be less evangelical than "recompense," "punishment," and "sitting
in judgment"!) --Once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah
appeared in the foreground; attention was riveted upon an historical moment:
the "kingdom of God" is to come, with judgment upon his enemies. . . But in
all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the "kingdom of
God" as a last act, as a mere promise! The Gospels had been, in fact, the
incarnation, the fulfillment, therealization of this "kingdom of
God." It was only now that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness
against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the character of the
Master was thereby turned into a Pharisee and theologian himself! On
the other hand, the savage veneration of these completely unbalanced souls
could no longer endure the Gospel doctrine, taught by Jesus, of the equal
right of all men to be children of God: their revenge took the form of
elevating Jesus in an extravagant fashion, and thus separating him
from themselves: just as, in earlier times, the Jews, to revenge themselves
upon their enemies, separated themselves from their God, and placed him on a
great height. The One God and the Only Son of God: both were products of
resentment . . . .

41.

--And from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: "how
could God allow it!" To which the deranged reason of the little
community formulated an answer that was terrifying in its absurdity: God
gave his son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. At once
there was an end of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in its most
obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for the sins
of the guilty! What appalling paganism !--Jesus himself had done away with
the very concept of "guilt," he denied that there was any gulf fixed between
God and man; he lived this unity between God and man, and that was
precisely his "glad tidings". . . And not as a mere
privilege!--From this time forward the type of the Saviour was corrupted,
bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment and of the second coming, the
doctrine of death as a sacrifice, the doctrine of the resurrection,
by means of which the entire concept of "blessedness," the whole and
only reality of the gospels, is juggled away--in favour of a state of
existence after death! . . . St. Paul, with that rabbinical impudence
which shows itself in all his doings, gave a logical quality to that
conception, that indecent conception, in this way: "If Christ
did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is in vain!"--And at once
there sprang from the Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable
promises, the shameless doctrine of personal immortality. . . Paul
even preached it as a reward . . .

42.

One now begins to see just what it was that came to an end with
the death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a
Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish happiness on
earth--real, not merely promised. For this remains--as I have
already pointed out--the essential difference between the two religions of
decadence: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfills;
Christianity promises everything, but fulfills nothing.--Hard upon
the heels of the "glad tidings" came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In
Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the "bearer of glad tidings"; he
represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic
of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to
hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The
life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the
law of the whole gospels--nothing was left of all this after that
counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality;
surely not historical truth! . . . Once more the priestly instinct of
the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history--he simply
struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and
invented his own history of Christian beginnings. Going
further, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that
it became a mere prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it
now appeared, had referred to his "Saviour." . . . Later on the
church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to
Christianity . . . The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life,
his death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his
death--nothing remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact
with reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life
to a place behind this existence--in the lie of the "risen"
Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour--what he needed
was the death on the cross, and something more. To see anything
honest in such a man as Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical
enlightenment, when he converts an hallucination into a proof of the
resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believe his tale that he suffered
from this hallucination himself--this would be a genuine niaiserie in
a psychologist. Paul willed the end; therefore he also willed the
means. --What he himself didn't believe was swallowed readily enough by the
idiots among whom he spread his teaching.--What he wanted was
power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power--he had use only
for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of
tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs. What was the only
part of Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on? Paul's invention, his
device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief
in the immortality of the soul--that is to say, the doctrine of
"judgment".

43.

When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself,
but in "the beyond"--in nothingness--thenone has taken away
its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality
destroys all reason, all natural instinct--henceforth, everything in the
instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the
future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any
meaning: this is now the "meaning" of life. . . . Why be
public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour
together, trust one another, or concern one's self about the common welfare,
and try to serve it? . . . Merely so many "temptations," so many
strayings from the "straight path."--"One thing only is necessary". .
. That every man, because he has an "immortal soul," is as good as every
other man; that in an infinite universe of things the "salvation" of
every individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that
insignificant bigots and the three-fourths insane may assume that the laws
of nature are constantly suspended in their behalf--it is impossible
to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of
selfishness to infinity, to insolence. And yet Christianity has to
thank precisely this miserable flattery of personal vanity for its
triumph--it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied,
the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off-scouring of humanity to
its side. The "salvation of the soul"--in plain English: "the world revolves
around me." . . . The poisonous doctrine, "equal rights for all," has
been propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and
crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all
feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say,
upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every
development of civilization--out of the ressentiment of the masses it
has forged its chief weapons against us, against everything noble,
joyous and high spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth . .
. To allow "immortality" to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the
most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated.--And
let us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had,
even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights,
for the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride in himself and
his equals--for the pathos of distance. . .Our
politics is sick with this lack of courage!--The aristocratic attitude of
mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief
in the "privileges of the majority" makes and will continue to make
revolution--it is Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian
valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood and
crime! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground
against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the "lowly" lowers .
. .

44.

--The gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that was
already persistent within the primitive community. That which Paul,
with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was at
bottom merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of the
Saviour.--These gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties lurk
behind every word. I confess--I hope it will not be held against me--that it
is precisely for this reason that they offer first-rate joy to a
psychologist--as the opposite of all merely naive corruption, as
refinement par excellence, as an artistic triumph in psychological
corruption. The gospels, in fact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole is not
to be compared to them. Here we are among Jews: this is the first
thing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the
matter. This positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal
"holiness" unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this
elevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level of an art--all
this is not an accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to
any violation of nature. The thing responsible is race. The whole of
Judaism appears in Christianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and
there, after many centuries of earnest Jewish training and hard practice of
Jewish technic, the business comes to the stage of mastery. The Christian,
that ultima ratio of lying, is the Jew all over again--he is
threefold the Jew. . . The underlying will to make use only of such
concepts, symbols and attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the
instinctive repudiation of every other mode of thought, and every
other method of estimating values and utilities--this is not only tradition,
it is inheritance: only as an inheritance is it able to operate with
the force of nature. The whole of mankind, even the best minds of the best
ages (with one exception, perhaps hardly human--), have permitted themselves
to be deceived. The gospels have been read as a book of innocence. .
. surely no small indication of the high skill with which the trick has been
done.--Of course, if we could actually see these astounding bigots
and bogus saints, even if only for an instant, the farce would come to an
end,--and it is precisely because I cannot read a word of theirs
without seeing their attitudinizing that I have made am end of them.
. . . I simply cannot endure the way they have of rolling up their
eyes.--For the majority, happily enough, books are mere literature.--Let us
not be led astray: they say "judge not," and yet they condemn to hell
whoever stands in their way. In letting God sit in judgment they judge
themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves; in demanding
that every one show the virtues which they themselves happen to be
capable of--still more, which they must have in order to remain on
top--they assume the grand air of men struggling for virtue, of men engaging
in a war that virtue may prevail. "We live, we die, we sacrifice ourselves
for the good" (--"the truth," "the light," "the kingdom of God"): in
point of fact, they simply do what they cannot help doing. Forced, like
hypocrites, to be sneaky, to hide in corners, to slink along in the shadows,
they convert their necessity into aduty: it is on grounds of duty
that they account for their lives of humility, and that humility becomes
merely one more proof of their piety. . . Ah, that humble, chaste,
charitable brand of fraud! "Virtue itself shall bear witness for us.". . . .
One may read the gospels as books of moral seduction: these petty
folks fasten themselves to morality--they know the uses of morality!
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the
nose!--The fact is that the conscious conceit of the chosen here
disguises itself as modesty: it is in this way that they, the "community,"
the "good and just," range themselves, once and for always, on one
side, the side of "the truth"--and the rest of mankind, "the world," on the
other. . . In that we observe the most fatal sort of megalomania that
the earth has ever seen: little abortions of bigots and liars began to claim
exclusive rights in the concepts of "God," "the truth," "the light," "the
spirit," "love," "wisdom" and "life," as if these things were synonyms of
themselves and thereby they sought to fence themselves off from the "world";
little super-Jews, ripe for some sort of madhouse, turned values upside down
in order to meet their notions, just as if the Christian were the meaning,
the salt, the standard and even thelast judgment of all the rest. . .
. The whole disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already
existed in the world a similar megalomania, allied to this one in race, to
wit, the Jewish: once a chasm began to yawn between Jews and
Judaeo-Christians, the latter had no choice but to employ the
self-preservative measures that the Jewish instinct had devised, even
against the Jews themselves, whereas the Jews had employed them only
against non-Jews. The Christian is simply a Jew of the "reformed"
confession.--

45.

--I offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people have got
into their heads--what they have put into the mouth of the Master:
the unalloyed creed of "beautiful souls."--

"And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart
thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them.
Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in
the day of judgment, than for that city" (Mark vi, 11)--How
evangelical!

"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe
in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and
he were cast into the sea" (Mark ix, 42) .--How evangelical! --

"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to
enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast
into hell fire; Where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched."
(Mark ix, 47)15--It is not exactly the eye that is meant.

"Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which
shall not taste death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with
power." (Mark ix, 1.)--Well lied, lion!16 . . . .

"Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his
cross, and follow me. For . . ." (Note of a psychologist.
Christian morality is refuted by its fors: its reasons are
against it,--this makes it Christian.) Mark viii, 34.--

"Judge not, that ye be not judged. With what measure ye mete, it shall be
measured to you again." (Matthew vii, l.)17--What a notion of justice, of a "just" judge! . . .

"For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the
publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more
than others? do not even the publicans so?" (Matthew V, 46.)18--Principle of "Christian love": it insists upon being well
paid in the end. . . .

"But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father
forgive your trespasses." (Matthew vi, 15.)--Very compromising for the said
"father."

"But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all
these things shall be added unto you." (Matthew vi, 33.)--All these things:
namely, food, clothing, all the necessities of life. An error, to put
it mildly. . . . A bit before this God appears as a tailor, at least in
certain cases.

"Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is
great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the
prophets." (Luke vi, 23.)--Impudent rabble! It compares itself to the
prophets. . .

"Know yea not that yea are the temple of God, and that the spirit
of God dwelt in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God
destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple yea are."
(Paul, 1 Corinthians iii, 16.)19--For that sort of thing one cannot have enough contempt. . . .

"Do yea not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world
shall be judged by you, are yea unworthy to judge the smallest matters?"
(Paul, 1 Corinthians vi, 2.)--Unfortunately, not merely the speech of a
lunatic. . .

This frightful impostor then proceeds: "Know yea not that we shall
judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?". . .

"Hat not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the
wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the
foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. . . . Not many wise men
after the flesh, not men mighty, not many noble are called: But God
hat chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hat
chosen the weak things of the world confound the things which are mighty;
And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hat God chosen,
yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are:
That no flesh should glory in his presence." (Paul, 1 Corinthians i,
20ff.)20 --In order to understand this passage, a first rate
example of the psychology underlying every Chandala-morality, one should
read the first part of my "Genealogy of Morals": there, for the first time,
the antagonism between a noble morality and a morality born of
ressentiment and impotent vengefulness is exhibited. Paul was the
greatest of all apostles of revenge. . . .

46.

--What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves before
reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very
advisable. One would as little choose "early Christians" for companions as
Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them . . . Neither
has a pleasant smell.--I have searched the New Testament in vain for a
single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly,
open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make the first step
upward--the instinct for cleanliness is lacking. . . . Only evil
instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil
instincts. It is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes, a
self-deception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the New
Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up with
delight that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one
may say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Ceasar Borgia to the Duke of Parma:
"e tutto Iesto"--immortallyhealthy, immortally cheerful
and sound. . . .These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation. They
attack, but everything they attack is thereby distinguished. Whoever
is attacked by an "early Christian" is surely not befouled . . . On
the contrary, it is an honour to have an "early Christian" as an opponent.
One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration for whatever
it abuses--not to speak of the "wisdom of this world," which an impudent
wind bag tries to dispose of "by the foolishness of preaching." . . . Even
the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such opposition: they must
certainly have been worth something to have been hated in such an indecent
manner. Hypocrisy--as if this were a charge that the "early Christians"
dared to make!--After all, they were the privileged, and that
was enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no other excuse. The "early
Christian"--and also, I fear, the "last Christian," whom I may perhaps
live to see--is a rebel against all privilege by profound
instinct--he lives and makes war for ever for "equal rights." . . .Strictly
speaking, he has no alternative. When a man proposes to represent, in his
own person, the "chosen of God"--or to be a "temple of God," or a "judge of
the angels"--then every other criterion, whether based upon honesty,
upon intellect, upon manliness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the
heart, becomes simply "worldly"--evil in itself. . . Moral: every
word that comes from the lips of an "early Christian" is a lie, and his
every act is instinctively dishonest--all his values, all his aims are
noxious, but whoever he hates, whatever he hates, has real
value . . . The Christian, and particularly the Christian priest, is
thus a criterion of values.

--Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a
solitary figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To
regard a Jewish imbroglio seriously--that was quite beyond him. One
Jew more or less-- what did it matter? . . . The noble scorn of a Roman,
before whom the word "truth" was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New
Testament with the only saying that has any value--and that is at
once its criticism and its destruction: "What is truth?". . .

47.

--The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God,
either in history, or in nature, or behind nature--but that we regard
what has been honoured as God, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as absurd,
as injurious; not as a mere error, but as acrime against life. . . We
deny that God is God . . . If any one were to show us this Christian
God, we'd be still less inclined to believe in him.--In a formula: deus,
qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.--Such a religion as Christianity,
which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the
moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the
deadly enemy of the "wisdom of this world," which is to say, of
science--and it will give the name of good to whatever means serve to
poison, calumniate and cry down all intellectual discipline, all
lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble
coolness and freedom of the mind."Faith," as an imperative, vetoes
science--in praxi, lying at any price. . . . Paul well knew
that lying--that "faith"--was necessary; later on the church borrowed
the fact from Paul.--The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who
"reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom of this world" (especially the two great
enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an
indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very
thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, thora--that is
essentially Jewish. Paul wants to dispose of the "wisdom of this
world": his enemies are the good philologians and physicians of the
Alexandrine school--on them he makes his war. As a matter of fact no man can
be a philologian or a physician without being also Antichrist.
That is to say, as a philologian a man sees behind the "holy
books," and as a physician he sees behind the physiological
degeneration of the typical Christian. The physician says "incurable"; the
philologian says "fraud.". . .

48.

--Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the
beginning of the Bible--of God's mortal terror of science? . . . No
one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence
opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest:
he faces only one great danger; ergo, "God" faces only one
great danger.--

The old God, wholly "spirit," wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is
promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom
even gods struggle in vain.21What does he do? He creates man--man is entertaining. . . But
then he notices that man is also bored. God's pity for the only form of
distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates
other animals. God's first mistake: to man these other animals were not
entertaining--he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an
"animal" himself.--So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an
end--and also many other things! Woman was the second mistake of
God.--"Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva"--every priest knows that; "from
woman comes every evil in the world"--every priest knows that, too. Ergo,
she is also to blame for science. . . It was through woman that
man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.--What happened? The old God
was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest
blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men
godlike--it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes
scientific!--Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is
forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the
original sin. This is all there is of morality.--"Thou shalt
not know"--the rest follows from that.--God's mortal terror, however,
did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one's
self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer:
Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought--and all
thoughts are bad thoughts!--Man must not think.--And so the priest
invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of
misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness--nothing but
devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don't allow
him to think. . . Nevertheless--how terrible!--, the edifice of
knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods--what
is to be done?--The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he
makes men destroy one another (--the priests have always had need of
war....). War--among other things, a great disturber of science
!--Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in
spite of war.--So the old God comes to his final resolution: "Man has become
scientific--there is no help for it: he must be drowned!". . . .

49.

--I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the
whole psychology of the priest.--The priest knows of only one great
danger: that is science--the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But
science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions--a man
must have time, he must have an overflowing intellect, in order to
"know." . . ."Therefore, man must be made unhappy,"--this has been,
in all ages, the logic of the priest.--It is easy to see just what,
by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world
:--"sin." . . . The concept of guilt and punishment, the
whole "moral order of the world," was set up against science--against
the deliverance of man from priests. . . . Man must not look outward;
he must look inward. He must not look at things shrewdly and
cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must
suffer . . . And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of
the priest.--Away with physicians! What is needed is a
Saviour.--Theconcept of guilt and punishment, including the
doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," of "forgiveness"--lies through
and through, and absolutely without psychological reality--were devised to
destroy man's sense of causality: they are an attack upon the concept
of cause and effect !--And not an attack with the fist, with the
knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the
most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of
priests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism of pale,
subterranean leeches! . . . When the natural consequences of an act are no
longer "natural," but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of
superstition--by "God," by "spirits," by "souls"--and reckoned as merely
"moral" consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then
the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed--then the greatest of
crimes against humanity has been perpetrated.--I repeat that sin, man's
self-desecration par excellence, was invented inorder to make
science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the
priest rules through the invention of sin.--

50.

--In this place I can't permit myself to omit a psychology of "belief,"
of the "believer," for the special benefit of 'believers." If there remain
any today who do not yet know how indecent it is to be
"believing"--or how much a sign of decadence, of a broken will to
live--then they will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice reaches even the
deaf.--It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that there
prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truth that is called "proof
by power." Faith makes blessed: therefore it is true."--It
might be objected right here that blessedness is not demonstrated, it is
merely promised: it hangs upon "faith" as a condition--one shall
be blessed because one believes. . . . But what of the thing that
the priest promises to the believer, the wholly transcendental "beyond"--how
is that to be demonstrated?--The "proof by power," thus assumed, is
actually no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith
promises will not fail to appear. In a formula: "I believe that faith makes
for blessedness--therefore, it is true." . . But this is as far as we
may go. This "therefore" would be absurdum itself as a criterion of
truth.--But let us admit, for the sake of politeness, that blessedness by
faith may be demonstrated (--not merely hoped for, and not
merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest): even so, could
blessedness--in a technical term, pleasure--everbe a
proof of truth? So little is this true that it is almost a proof against
truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the question "What
is true?" or, at all events, it is enough to make that "truth" highly
suspicious. The proof by "pleasure" is a proof of "pleasure--nothing
more; why in the world should it be assumed that true judgments give
more pleasure than false ones, and that, in conformity to some
pre-established harmony, they necessarily bring agreeable feelings in their
train?--The experience of all disciplined and profound minds teaches the
contrary. Man has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had
to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human
trust cling to. Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service
of truth is the hardest of all services.--What, then, is the meaning of
integrityin things intellectual? It means that a man must be severe
with his own heart, that he must scorn "beautiful feelings," and that he
makes every Yea and Nay a matter of conscience!--Faith makes
blessed:therefore, it lies. . . .

51.

The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for
blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idee fixe by no
means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no
mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before:
all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum.
Not, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie
that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums.
Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had
need of a superabundance of health--the actual ulterior purpose of the whole
system of salvation of the church is to make people ill. And the
church itself--doesn't it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate
ideal?--The whole earth as a madhouse?--The sort of religious man that the
church wants is a typical decadent; the moment at which a
religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous
disorder; the inner world" of the religious man is so much like the "inner
world" of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish
between them; the "highest" states of mind, held up be fore mankind by
Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form--the
church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds
in majorem dei honorem. . . .Once I ventured to designate the
whole Christian system of training22in penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as a
method of producing a folie circulaire upon a soil already prepared
for it, which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be a
Christian: one is not "converted" to Christianity--one must first be sick
enough for it. . . .We others, who have the courage for health and
likewise for contempt,--we may well despise a religion that teaches
misunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the superstition
about the soul! that makes a "virtue" of insufficient nourishment! that
combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself
that it is possible to carry about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of a body,
and that, to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of
"perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence,
so-called "holiness"--a holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms
of an impoverished, enervated and incurably disordered body! . . . The
Christian movement, as a European movement, was from the start no more than
a general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (--who now,
under cover of Christianity, aspire to power)-- It does not represent
the decay of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of
decadence products from all directions, crowding together and seeking
one another out. It was not, as has been thought, the corruption of
antiquity, of noble antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one
cannot too sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains
that theory. At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the
whole imperium were Christianized, the contrary type, the
nobility, reached its finest and ripest development. The majority became
master; democracy, with its Christian instincts, triumphed . . .
Christianity was not "national," it was not based on race--it appealed to
all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere.
Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core--the instinct
against the healthy, against health. Everything that is
well--constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence to
its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul's priceless saying: "And God
hath chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish things
of the world, the base things of the world, and things which are
despised":23 this was the formula; in hoc signo the decadence
triumphed.--God on the cross--isman always to miss the
frightful inner significance of this symbol?--Everything that suffers,
everything that hangs on the cross, is divine. . . . We all hang on
the cross, consequently we are divine. . . . We alone are divine. . .
. Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed
by it--Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of
humanity.--

52.

Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual
well-being,--sick reasoning is the only sort that it can use as
Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it
pronounces a curse upon "intellect," upon the superbia of the healthy
intellect. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the
typically Christian state of "faith" must be a form of sickness too,
and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge
must be banned by the church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus
a sin from the start. . . . The complete lack of psychological cleanliness
in the priest--revealed by a glance at him--is a phenomenon resulting
from decadence,--one may observe in hysterical women and in
rachitic children how regularly the falsification of instincts, delight in
lying for the mere sake of lying, and incapacity for looking straight and
walking straight are symptoms of decadence. "Faith" means the will to
avoid knowing what is true. The pietist, the priest of either sex, is a
fraud because he is sick: his instinct demands that the truth
shall never be allowed its rights on any point. "Whatever makes for illness
is good; whatever issues from abundance, from super-abundance, from
power, is evil": so argues the believer. The impulse to
lie--it is by this that I recognize every foreordained
theologian.--Another characteristic of the theologian is his unfitness
for philology. What I here mean by philology is, in a general sense, the
art of reading with profit--the capacity for absorbing facts without
interpreting them falsely, and without losing caution, patience
and subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philology as ephexis24 in interpretation: whether one be dealing with books, with
newspaper reports, with the most fateful events or with weather
statistics--not to mention the "salvation of the soul." . . . The way in
which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to explain, say,
a "passage of Scripture," or an experience, or a victory by the national
army, by turning upon it the high illumination of the Psalms of David, is
always so daring that it is enough to make a philologian run up a
wall. But what shall he do when pietists and other such cows from Suabia25 use the "finger of God" to convert their miserably commonplace
and huggermugger existence into a miracle of "grace," a "providence" and an
"experience of salvation"? The most modest exercise of the intellect, not to
say of decency, should certainly be enough to convince these interpreters of
the perfect childishness and unworthiness of such a misuse of the divine
digital dexterity. However small our piety, if we ever encountered a god who
always cured us of a cold in the head at just the right time, or got us into
our carriage at the very instant heavy rain began to fall, he would seem so
absurd a god that he'd have to be abolished even if he existed. God as a
domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac--man--at bottom, he is'
a mere name for the stupidest sort of chance. . . . "Divine Providence,"
which every third man in "educated Germany" still believes in, is so strong
an argument against God that it would be impossible to think of a stronger.
And in any case it is an argument against Germans! . . .

53.

--It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth
of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything
to do with the truth at all. In the very tone in which a martyr flings what
he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so low a grade
of intellectual honesty and such insensibility to the problem of
"truth," that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth is not something
that one man has and another man has not: at best, only peasants, or peasant
apostles like Luther, can think of truth in any such way. One may rest
assured that the greater the degree of a man's intellectual conscience the
greater will be his modesty, his discretion, on this point. To
know in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy, to know anything
further . . . "Truth," as the word is understood by every prophet,
every sectarian, every free-thinker, every Socialist and every churchman, is
simply a complete proof that not even a beginning has been made in the
intellectual discipline and self-control that are necessary to the
unearthing of even the smallest truth.--The deaths of the martyrs, it may be
said in passing, have been misfortunes of history: they have misled .
. . The conclusion that all idiots, women and plebeians come to, that there
must be something in a cause for which any one goes to his death (or which,
as under primitive Christianity, sets off epidemics of death-seeking)--this
conclusion has been an unspeakable drag upon the testing of facts, upon the
whole spirit of inquiry and investigation. The martyrs have damaged
the truth. . . . Even to this day the crude fact of persecution is
enough to give an honourable name to the most empty sort of
sectarianism.--But why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that
some one had laid down his life for it?--An error that becomes honourable is
simply an error that has acquired one seductive charm the more: do you
suppose, Messrs. Theologians, that we shall give you the chance to be
martyred for your lies?--One best disposes of a cause by respectfully
putting it on ice--that is also the best way to dispose of theologians. . .
. This was precisely the world-historical stupidity of all the persecutors:
that they gave the appearance of honour to the cause they opposed--that they
made it a present of the fascination of martyrdom. . . .Women are still on
their knees before an error because they have been told that some one died
on the cross for it. Is the cross, then, an argument?--But about all
these things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been needed
for thousands of years--Zarathustra.

They made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their folly
taught them that the truth is proved by blood. But blood is the worst of
all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth even the purest teaching and
turneth it into madness and hatred in the heart. And when one goeth
through fire for his teaching--what doth that prove? Verily, it is more when
one's teaching cometh out of one's own burning!26

54.

Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical.
Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed
from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power,
manifest themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not
count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of
values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they
do not see what is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any
purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred
convictions beneath him--and behind him. . . . A mind that
aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is
necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction belongs to
strength, and to an independent point of view. . . That grand passion which
is at once the foundation and the power of a sceptic's existence, and is
both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole
of his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him
courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not
begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one may achieve
a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and uses
up convictions; it does not yield to them--it knows itself to be
sovereign.--On the contrary, the need of faith, of some thing unconditioned
by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of
weakness. The man of faith, the "believer" of any sort, is
necessarily a dependent man--such a man cannot posit himself as a
goal, nor can he find goals within himself. The "believer" does not belong
to himself; he can only be a means to an end; he must be used up; he
needs some one to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honours to an
ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his
prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an
evidence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement. . . When one
reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations
to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what extent
control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and only
condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and
especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and "faith." To
the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many
things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and
through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly--these are
conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token
they are antagonists of the truthful man--of the truth. . . . The
believer is not free to answer the question, "true" or "not true," according
to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point would
work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his vision turn
the man of convictions into a fanatic--Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau,
Robespierre, Saint-Simon--these types stand in opposition to the strong,
emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these sick
intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the
great masses--fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses
to listening to reasons. . . .

55.

--One step further in the psychology of conviction, of "faith." It is now
a good while since I first proposed for consideration the question whether
convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to truth than lies. ("Human,
All-Too-Human," I, aphorism 483.)27 This time I desire to put the question definitely: is there
any actual difference between a lie and a conviction?--All the world
believes that there is; but what is not believed by all the world!--Every
conviction has its history, its primitive forms, its stage of tentativeness
and error: it becomes a conviction only after having been, for a long
time, not one, and then, for an even longer time, hardly one. What if
falsehood be also one of these embryonic forms of conviction?--Sometimes all
that is needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes
a conviction in the son.--I call it lying to refuse to see what one sees, or
to refuse to see it as it is: whether the lie be uttered before
witnesses or not before witnesses is of no consequence. The most common sort
of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a
relatively rare offence.--Now, this will not to see what one sees,
this will not to see it as it is, is almost the first requisite for
all who belong to a party of whatever sort: the party man becomes inevitably
a liar. For example, the German historians are convinced that Rome was
synonymous with despotism and that the Germanic peoples brought the spirit
of liberty into the world: what is the difference between this conviction
and a lie? Is it to be wondered at that all partisans, including the German
historians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of morality upon their
tongues--that morality almost owes its very survival to the fact that
the party man of every sort has need of it every moment?--"This is our
conviction: we publish it to the whole world; we live and die for
it--let us respect all who have convictions!"--I have actually heard such
sentiments from the mouths of anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! An
anti-Semite surely does not become more respectable because he lies on
principle. . . The priests, who have more finesse in such matters, and who
well understand the objection that lies against the notion of a conviction,
which is to say, of a falsehood that becomes a matter of principle
because it serves a purpose, have borrowed from the Jews the shrewd
device of sneaking in the concepts, "God," "the will of God" and "the
revelation of God" at this place. Kant, too, with his categorical
imperative, was on the same road: this was hispractical reason.28 There are questions regarding the truth or untruth of which it
is not for man to decide; all the capital questions, all the capital
problems of valuation, are beyond human reason. . . . To know the limits of
reason--that alone is genuine. philosophy. Why did God make a
revelation to man? Would God have done anything superfluous? Man could
not find out for himself what was good and what was evil, so God taught
him His will. Moral: the priest does not lie--the question, "true" or
"untrue," has nothing to do with such things as the priest discusses; it is
impossible to lie about these things. In order to lie here it would be
necessary to knowwhat is true. But this is more than man can
know; therefore, the priest is simply the mouth-piece of God.--Such a
priestly syllogism is by no means merely Jewish and Christian; the right to
lie and the shrewd dodge of "revelation" belong to the general
priestly type--to the priest of the decadence as well as to the
priest of pagan times (--Pagans are all those who say yes to life, and to
whom "God" is a word signifying acquiescence in all things) --The "law," the
"will of God," the "holy book," and "inspiration"--all these things are
merely words for the conditionsunder which the priest comes to power
and with which he maintains his power,--these concepts are to be
found at the bottom of all priestly organizations, and of all priestly or
priestly-philosophical schemes of governments. The "holy lie"--common alike
to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to the Christian
church--is not even wanting in Plato. "Truth is here": this means, no matter
where it is heard, the priest lies. . . .

56.

--In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end of lying?
The fact that, in Christianity, "holy" ends are not visible is my
objection to the means it employs. Only bad ends appear: the
poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body,
the degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of
sin--therefore, its means are also bad.--I have a contrary feeling
when I read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and superior
work, which it would be a sin against the intelligence to so much as
name in the same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there
is a genuine philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an evil-smelling mess
of Jewish rabbinism and superstition,--it gives even the most fastidious
psychologist something to sink his teeth into. And, not to forget
what is most important, it differs fundamentally from every kind of Bible:
by means of it the nobles, the philosophers and the warriors keep the
whip-hand over the majority; it is full of noble valuations, it shows a
feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward
self and life--the sun shines upon the whole book.--All the things on
which Christianity vents its fathomless vulgarity--for example, procreation,
women and marriage--are here handled earnestly, with reverence and with love
and confidence. How can any one really put into the hands of children and
ladies a book which contains such vile things as this: "to avoid
fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her
own husband; . . . it is better to marry than to burn"?29 And is it possible to be a Christian so long as the
origin of man is Christianized, which is to say, befouled, by the
doctrine of the immaculata conceptio? . . . I know of no book in
which so many delicate and kindly things are said of women as in the Code of
Manu; these old grey-beards and saints have a way of being gallant to women
that it would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. "The mouth of a woman," it
says in one place, "the breasts of a maiden, the prayer of a child and the
smoke of sacrifice are always pure." In another place: "there is nothing
purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire
and the breath of a maiden." Finally, in still another place--perhaps this
is also a holy lie--: "all the orifices of the body above the navel are
pure, and all below are impure. Only in the maiden is the whole body pure."

57.

One catches the unholiness of Christian means in flagranti
by the simple process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside
the ends sought by the Code of Manu--by putting these enormously
antithetical ends under a strong light. The critic of Christianity cannot
evade the necessity of making Christianity contemptible.--A book of
laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good
law-book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical
experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no
longer creates. The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is
recognition of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a
slowly and painfully attained truth are fundamentally different from
those which one would make use of to prove it. A law-book never recites the
utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so
it would lose the imperative tone, the "thou shalt," on which obedience is
based. The problem lies exactly here.--At a certain point in the evolution
of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight, which is to say,
the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that the series of
experiences determining how all shall live--or can live--has come to
an end. The object now is to reap as rich and as complete a harvest as
possible from the days of experiment and hard experience. In
consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further
experimentation--the continuation of the state in which values are fluent,
and are tested, chosen and criticized ad infnitum.Against
this a double wall is set up: on the one hand, revelation, which is
the assumption that the reasons lying behind the laws are not of human
origin, that they were not sought out and found by a slow process and after
many errors, but that they are of divine ancestry, and came into being
complete, perfect, without a history, as a free gift, a miracle . . .
; and on the other hand, tradition, which is the assumption that the
law has stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impious and a
crime against one's forefathers to bring it into question. The authority of
the law is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and the fathers
lived it.--The higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to
distract consciousness, step by step, from its concern with notions of right
living (that is to say, those that have been proved to be right by
wide and carefully considered experience), so that instinct attains to a
perfect automatism--a primary necessity to every sort of mastery, to every
sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw up such a law-book as Manu's
means to lay before a people the possibility of future mastery, of
attainable perfection--it permits them to aspire to the highest reaches of
the art of life. To that end the thing must be made unconscious: that
is the aim of every holy lie.--The order of castes, the highest, the
dominating law, is merely the ratification of an order of nature, of
a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no "modern
idea," can exert any influence. In every healthy society there are three
physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but mutually
conditioning one another, and each of these has its own hygiene, its own
sphere of work, its own special mastery and feeling of perfection. It
isnot Manu but nature that sets off in one class those who are
chiefly intellectual, in another those who are marked by muscular strength
and temperament, and in a third those who are distinguished in neither one
way or the other, but show only mediocrity--the last-named represents the
great majority, and the first two the select. The superior caste--I call it
the fewest--has,as the most perfect, the privileges of the
few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth.
Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the
beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum est
paucorum hominum:30 goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming to
them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees
ugliness--or indignation against the general aspect of things.
Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. "The world
is perfect"--soprompts the instinct of the intellectual,
the instinct of the man who says yes to life. "Imperfection, what ever is
inferior to us, distance, the pathos of distance, even the Chandala
themselves are parts of this perfection. "The most intelligent men, like the
strongest, find their happiness where others would find only
disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others,
in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes
second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a
privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would
crush all others. . . . Knowledge--a form of asceticism.--They are the most
honourable kind of men: but that does not prevent them being the most
cheerful and most amiable. They rule, not because they want to, but because
they are; they are not at liberty to play second.--The second
caste: to this belong the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and
security, the more noble warriors, above all, the king as the highest form
of warrior, judge and preserver of the law. The second in rank constitute
the executive arm of the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking
from them all that is rough in the business of ruling-their
followers, their right hand, their most apt disciples.--In all this, I
repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing "made up"; whatever is to the
contrary is made up--by it nature is brought to shame. . . The order
of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of
life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the
maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the
highest types--the inequality of rights is essential to the existence
of any rights at all.--A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the
privileges that accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate
the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts
the heights--the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high
civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary
prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The
handicrafts, commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art,
in brief, the whole range of occupational activities, are compatible
only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of
place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much
opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism. The fact that a man is publicly
useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural
predisposition; it is not society, but the only sort of happiness
that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent machines. To
the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct
for mastering one thing, for specialization. It would be altogether unworthy
of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in
itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite to the appearance of
the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to a high degree of
civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more
delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not
merely kindness of heart--it is simply his duty. . . . Whom do I hate
most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the
apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman's instincts, his
pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence--who make him
envious and teach him revenge. . . . Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it
lies in the assertion of "equal" rights. . . . What is bad? But I
have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from
revenge.--The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry. . . .

58.

In point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great difference:
whether one preserves thereby or destroys. There is a perfect likeness
between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points only
toward destruction. One need only turn to history for a proof of this: there
it appears with appalling distinctness. We have just studied a code of
religious legislation whose object it was to convert the conditions which
cause life to flourish into an "eternal" social
organization,--Christianity found its mission in putting an end to such an
organization, because life flourished under it. There the benefits
that reason had produced during long ages of experiment and insecurity were
applied to the most remote uses, and an effort was made to bring in a
harvest that should be as large, as rich and as complete as possible; here,
on the contrary, the harvest is blighted overnight. . . .That which
stood there aere perennis, the imperium Romanum, the most
magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has ever
been achieved, and compared to which everything before it and after it
appears as patchwork, bungling, dilletantism--those holy anarchists
made it a matter of "piety" to destroy "the world,"which is to say,
the imperium Romanum, so that in the end not a stone stood upon
another--and even Germans and other such louts were able to become its
masters. . . . The Christian and the anarchist: both are decadents;
both are incapable of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous,
degenerating, blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortal
hatred of everything that stands up, and is great, and has durability,
and promises life a future. . . . Christianity was the vampire of the
imperium Romanum,-- overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of
the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great culture that could await
its time. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood? The
imperium Romanum that we know, and that the history of the Roman
provinces teaches us to know better and better,--this most admirable of all
works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure
to follow was not to prove its worth for thousands of years. To this
day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has been brought into
being, or even dreamed of!--This organization was strong enough to withstand
bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do with such
things--the first principle of all genuinely great architecture. But
it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest of all
forms of corruption--against Christians. . . . These stealthy worms, which
under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual,
sucking him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all
instinct for reality--this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang
gradually alienated all "souls," step by step, from that colossal edifice,
turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had
found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their
own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the
conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the
innocent, the unio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all, the
slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge--all that sort of
thing became master of Rome: the same kind of religion which, in a
pre-existent form, Epicurus had combatted. One has but to read Lucretius to
know what Epicurus made war upon--not paganism, but
"Christianity," which is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the
concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality.--He combatted the
subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity--to deny
immortality was already a form of genuine salvation.--Epicurus had
triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean--when
Paul appeared. . . Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of "the world,"
in the flesh and inspired by genius--the Jew, the eternal Jew par
excellence. . . . What he saw was how, with the aid of the small
sectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a "world
conflagration" might be kindled; how, with the symbol of "God on the cross,"
all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire,
might be amalgamated into one immense power. "Salvation is of the
Jews."--Christianity is the formula for exceeding and summing up the
subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great
Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his discernment of this fact the
genius of Paul showed itself. His instinct was here so sure that, with
reckless violence to the truth, he put the ideas which lent fascination to
every sort of Chandala religion into the mouth of the "Saviour" as his own
inventions, and not only into the mouth--he made out of him something
that even a priest of Mithras could understand. . . This was his revelation
at Damascus: he grasped the fact that he needed the belief in
immortality in order to rob "the world" of its value, that the concept of
"hell" would master Rome--that the notion of a "beyond" is the death of
life. Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more
than rhyme.

59.

The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no
word to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me.--And,
considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with
adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go
on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears!
. . To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?--All the prerequisites
to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there;
man had already perfected the great and incomparable art of reading
profitably--that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of
the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and
mechanics, were on the right road,--the sense of fact, the last and
more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were
already centuries old! Is all this properly understood? Every essential
to the beginning of the work was ready;--and the most essential,
it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to
develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness. What we have to day
reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves--for certain
bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies--that
is to say, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and
seriousness in the smallest things, the whole integrity of
knowledge--all these things were already there, and had been there for two
thousand years! More, there was also a refined and excellent tact and
taste! Not as mere brain-drilling! Not as "German" culture,
with its loutish manners! But as body, as bearing, as instinct--in short, as
reality. . . All gone for naught! Overnight it became merely a memory
!--The Greeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility, taste, methodical inquiry,
genius for organization and administration, faith in and the will to
secure the future of man, a great yes to everything entering into the
imperium Romanum and palpable to all the senses, a grand style that
was beyond mere art, but had become reality, truth, life . . --All
overwhelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of nature! Not trampled to
death by Teutons and others of heavy hoof! But brought to shame by crafty,
sneaking, invisible, anemic vampires! Not conquered,--only sucked dry! . . .
Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Everything wretched,
intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole ghetto-world
of the soul, was at once on top!--Oneneeds but read any
of the Christian agitators, for example, St. Augustine, in order to realize,
in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. It would be an
error, however, to assume that there was any lack of understanding in the
leaders of the Christian movement:--ah, but they were clever, clever to the
point of holiness, these fathers of the church! What they lacked was
something quite different. Nature neglected--perhaps forgot--to give them
even the most modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of cleanly
instincts. . . Between ourselves, they are not even men. . . . If Islam
despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least
assumes that it is dealing with men. . . .

60.

Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization,
and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan
civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was
fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than
that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down (--I do not say by what
sort of feet--) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for
its origin--because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined
luxuriousness of Moorish life! . . . The crusaders later made war on
something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have
grovelled in the dust--a civilization beside which even that of our
nineteenth century seems very poor and very "senile."--What they wanted, of
course, was booty: the orient was rich. . . . Let us put aside our
prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing more! The
German nobility, which is fundamentally a Viking nobility, was in its
element there: the church knew only too well how the German nobility was to
be won . . . The German noble, always the "Swiss guard" of the
church, always in the service of every bad instinct of the church--but
well paid. . . Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German
swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry
through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! At this point a
host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German nobility stands
outside the history of the higher civilization: the reason is
obvious. . . Christianity, alcohol--the two great means of
corruption. . . . Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam
and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is
already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a man is a
Chandala or he is not. . . . "War to the knife with Rome! Peace and
friendship with Islam!": this was the feeling, this was the act, of
that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick II.
What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit, before he can feel
decently? I can't make out how a German could ever feel
Christian. . . .

61.

Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred
times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the
last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap--the
Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be
understood, what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of
Christian values,--anattempt with all available means, all
instincts and all the resources of genius to bring about a triumph of the
opposite values, the more noble values. . . . This has been
the one great war of the past; there has never been a more critical question
than that of the Renaissance--it is my question too--; there has
never been a form of attack more fundamental, more direct, or more
violently delivered by a whole front upon the center of the enemy! To attack
at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and there enthrone
the more noble values--that is to say, to insinuate them into the
instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those sitting
there . . . I see before me the possibility of a perfectly heavenly
enchantment and spectacle :--it seems to me to scintillate with all the
vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so
divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of
years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in
significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it
should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter--Caesar Borgia
as pope! . . . Am I understood? . . . Well then, that would have been
the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for today--: by it
Christianity would have been swept away!--What happened? A German
monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an
unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion against the
Renaissance in Rome. . . . Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving,
the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its
capital--instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle.
A religious man thinks only of himself.--Luther saw only the depravity
of the papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming
apparent: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity
itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead
there was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty,
beautiful and daring things! . . . And Luther restored the church:
he attacked it. . . . The Renaissance--an event without meaning, a great
futility !--Ah, these Germans, what they have not cost us!
Futility--thathas always been the work of the Germans.--The
Reformation; Liebnitz; Kant and so-called German philosophy; the war of
"liberation"; the empire-every time a futile substitute for something that
once existed, for something irrecoverable . . . These Germans, I
confess, are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanliness in concept and
valuation, their cowardice before every honest yea and nay. For nearly a
thousand years they have tangled and confused everything their fingers have
touched; they have on their conscience all the half-way measures, all the
three-eighths-way measures, that Europe is sick of,--they also have on their
conscience the uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists, and the most
incurable and indestructible--Protestantism. . . . If mankind never manages
to get rid of Christianity the Germans will be to blame. . . .

62.

--With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I
condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most
terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth.
It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work
the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church
has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into
worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness
of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian" blessings!
Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it
lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself
immortal. . . . For example, the worm of sin: it was the church that
first enriched mankind with this misery!--The "equality of souls before
God"--this fraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the
base-minded--this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea,
and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order--this is Christian
dynamite. . . . The "humanitarian" blessings of Christianity forsooth!
To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of
self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all
good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the "humanitarianism" of
Christianity!--Parasitism as the only practice of the church; with
its anaemic and "holy" ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the
hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the cross as
the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard
of,--against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of
soul--against life itself. . . .

This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all
walls, wherever walls are to be found--I have letters that even the blind
will be able to see. . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the one
great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no
means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small
enough,--I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race. . . .

And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this
fatality befell--from the first day of Christianity!--Why not
rather from its last?--From today?--The transvaluation of all values! .
. .

THE

END

FOOTNOTES created and inserted by H.L. Mencken:

1. Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourth
hook of Herodotus. The Hyperboreans were a mythical people beyond the
Rhipaean mountains, in the far North. They enjoyed unbroken happiness and
perpetual youth. [RETURN TO TEXT]

24. That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks
scepticism was also occasionally called ephecticism. [RETURN TO
TEXT]

25. A reference to the University of Tubingen and its
famous school of Biblical criticism. The leader of this school was F. C.
Baur, and one of the men greatly influenced by it was Nietzsche's pet
abomination, David F. Strauss, himself a Suabian. Vide § 10 and § 28. [RETURN TO
TEXT]